The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - How To Change The World

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

A Message to Millenials: How to Change the World -- Properly. Young people want, rightly, to change the world. But how might this be properly done? Dr Jonathan Haidt recently contrasted Truth University with Social Justice University. Social Justice U has as its advantage the call to social transformation. In this video, I outline why Truth is the proper route to societal improvement -- and why that starts with the individual.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This is episode 15, how to change the world properly. The first half of this episode was released on YouTube as my message to millennials, how to change the world properly. The second half of this podcast is Dr. Peterson's New Year's Message to the World. You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon or by finding the link in the description.

Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com. Hi there. This is my message to millennials about how to change the world. And I would say how to change the world properly. Of course, the question then is, well, exactly what do you mean by properly? And of course, that's the fundamental issue. So this was triggered in part by something I read recently by Jonathan Hate. And Jonathan Hate is the professor of ethical leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business. And he's

been a very astute commentator recently on some of the political battles that have been going on in the social sciences, noting, for example, that there is very little political diversity in the views of social scientists and perhaps even less on the part of the people in the humanities. And hate recently wrote something which I'll put a link to in the description of this video, where he claimed that universities have to decide between social justice and truth, and on the side of, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. And then he juxtaposes John Stuart Mill with Karl Marx,

who said the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. He considers Marx the patron saint of social justice university, which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege. It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mail on the other hand, according to hate, is the patron saint of what he calls truth

you, which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other's biased and incomplete reasoning and in the process all become smarter. Hate points out the truth university dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox. So I guess this video is in part my call along with Jonathan Hate for young people to join truth university. But there's a problem with that because the university is where the truth is being sought. That's the university.

But there's a problem, and that is that young people want to change the world. And it's part of what PHA, the developmental psychologist, PHA, called the Messianic stage, and there's some real utility in that, because we're social creatures. And as we construct ourselves and formulate ourselves and bring our own character into being predicated on our biological platform, our biological being. We also simultaneously have to integrate, adjust to integrate with and negotiate with society, which sometimes needs to be changed. The structure of society has to be preserved, but it has to be updated and improved as it

moves forward, and so part of the problem is how to update and improve it without doing that so rapidly that you destroy everything of any value. So the problem I have with the Marxist perspective, and I've had this problem with it for a long time, is that I don't think that you should trust people whose primary goal when they're attempting to change the world for the better is to change other people. And you can tell who those people are because they're always blaming other people and they're looking for victims. They're looking for perpetrators and victims and then they're going off to stop the perpetrators. And I think that's wrong because, as Alexander Solzhenitsin said, he's a great Russian writer who helped bring down the Soviet Union. He said, the line between good and evil runs down every human's heart. So the real battle, as far as I'm concerned, and I think this goes along with the tradition

in which John Stuart Mill is firmly placed in, is that to overcome tyranny and malevolence and chaos and nihilism and the desire to bring everything to a halt, you have to repair the fissures and the rift that's in your own soul, basically. And that means that you have to confront the evil that lives in your own heart. And there's a statement from the New Testament that I think is very much apropole with regards to this particular idea. And this is part of the sermon on the Mount, which is a central text in Western, in the Western tradition. I would say obviously central to Christianity, but central to everything that Western civilization has built. And so Christ says to his followers, why behold us thou the moat that is in thy brother's eye, but consider us not

the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how will thou say to thy brother, let me pull out the moat out of thine eye. And behold, a beam is in thine own eye. Thou Hippocrate first cast out the beam out of thine own eye. And then, shall thou see clearly to cast the moat out of thy brother's eye. Well, I like that quote because it places the responsibility for change at every level of being on the individual. And obviously, the individual interacts with society, but the idea here is that unless the individual straightens out her own soul,

there's no possibility that the impact the individual can have on society can be anything, but say harmful in proportion to the harm that's still in the soul. These are important things to know. They're vitally important things to know. So, okay, so, but then we're faced with a conundrum that young people also want to change the world.

But that's no problem, because I think you can bring, you can bring truth, university, together with the desire to make real change, but change has to start in the right place. So I'm going to tell you how I think you should change yourself so that you can change the world. And so that the world that you bring into being will be a better world and not a worse one. Remember, you need to know about this, that the world that the fallow was of Marx brought

into being in the 20th century killed more than 100 million people, say in China and Russia, I mean the Soviet Union and in places like Cambodia and Vietnam. The world certainly changed as a consequence of Marxist doctrine, but it didn't change in a good direction. And of course, the Marxist doctrine is making itself heard in a massive way across the West again now. So, all right, so what should you do about that? Well, here's an idea. The first thing you have to do is orient yourself. Now, you probably have all watched Pinocchio, and Pinocchio is about how a Marionette, someone whose strings are being pulled by forces beyond his comprehension.

That's the situation of the undeveloped individual, Jepetto, who's a benevolent father, so a benevolent symbol, a symbol of benevolent culture, makes a puppet his son, and then wishes on a star. Now, a star is something that glitters up in the sky, and it's associated with the transcendent and the wishes on a star. Now a star is something that glitters up in the sky and it's associated with the transcendent and the beyond and the divine and you know if you look up in the night sky and it's very dark you get a feeling of awe it's because you're confronting your soul

so to speak your individual soul is confronting the cosmos and you can feel a relationship between you and and and the totality. So looking up into the sky is like a religious experience if it's a starry sky, and to wish upon a star is to find a light that orients you like the North Star, and to pick a highest goal, to pick the highest goal you can conceive of, and so that's what Jepetta does. He raises his eyes above his day-to-day concerns and tries to establish a relationship with the highest of all possible values. And he has the most profound of wishes, and the most profound of wishes is that the puppet that he's created could become a genuine individual, genuinely, fully developed human being.

And that's what you can wish for yourself. That's you can wish and aim for that in yourself. And then you see, that's how you deal with the suffering that's attendant on life, because life is suffering and because life is very hard and people get sick and they become mentally ill and there's malevolence in the world and there's tragedy. And so life is very, very hard. And if you're not properly oriented with regards to life, the fact that it's hard and the fact that it's full of suffering can warp and twist and bend you until you become murderous and resentful and even go beyond murderous and

resentment to wish for genocide and even to wish for the destruction of everything. And so you have to learn how to strengthen yourself as an individual so that you can bear the burden of being without becoming corrupt. You have to decide that that is what you're aiming for is that you want to become a fully developed human being and start being a pathetic marionette whose strings are being pulled by horrible forces behind the scenes. So I would say to wish on a star's to aim at the highest good and the question then is, well what is the good? Well we can answer that in two ways. We could say that the good is the opposite of evil. And I can tell you what evil is.

Evil is the conscious desire to produce suffering where suffering is not necessary. And so if you read about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps, for example, or in the Russian concentration camps during the time of the Soviet Union, you get a good flavor for what constitutes evil. And evil is the desire to exploit the vulnerability of other people, to self-consciously exploit the vulnerability of other people, and to elevate their suffering beyond their or anyone's ability to tolerate. And so the good is the opposite of that.

Whatever the opposite of that is, the good is harder to get a handle on. But here's one hint. I got this from reading Jean Piaget, partly who's a developmental psychologist and Piaget talked about the equilibrated state and an equilibrated state is like a game that children play where every child wants to play the game. You have a little social group and that's the children's play group and any of us the individuals within it those are the individual children and the and the structure is the game and it's a good game if everyone wants to play it. And PSJ noted that a game like that will outperform a game that people have to be tyrannized to play

because it doesn't require any enforcement cost. And so I've sort of developed the idea of an ill-equalibrated state to think that if you're aiming at the good, then you want what's good for you. And I mean good for you as if you were taking care of yourself and we're good to yourself, we're treating yourself like someone you loved, that was good for you in a way that would also be good for your family. And then it would be good for you and your family in a way that was also good for society.

And then it would be good for you and your family and society in a way that would be good for the world, and then it would be good now, and it would be good next week and the week after, and a year from now, and as long into the future as you can see. So, the good is something that's equilibrated across multiple levels of being in multiple time frames simultaneously, and it isn't necessarily that you know what that is going to be at any given moment, but you can orient yourself, so that's the state that you want to exist in. And I can tell you, as far as I can tell, when you exist in that state, even moment by moment, your life is imbued with a sense of meaning. And that sense of meaning can help you transcend suffering.

The philosopher Nietzsche said, he who has a why can bear any how. He who has a why can bear anyhow. He who has a why can bear anyhow. And so Nietzsche's idea was that if there was purpose in your life of sufficient grandeur, that not only could the suffering in life be accepted, but maybe it could even be appreciated. Like it could be that you're willing to bear the burden of being because of the exciting things that you can do with being, the things you can build and the things that you can bring about. And that might be the highest imaginable state of being. And that's a form of paradise, but it's not a paradise that you attain by transforming others. It's a paradise that you attain by transforming yourself. And that's a very difficult thing to do. And it's a very frightening thing to do, because it means that you're retooling your soul.

And that's a job for a real, that's the job for a forthright and honorable person. And it's an exciting enough task so that it will keep you occupied for the rest of your life, and then magical things will happen to you while you're doing it. And the world will arrange itself around you in the most wonderful way, in a musical way, so that every part of what you're experiencing plays off against every other part in a manner that has meaning embedded in every aspect of it. And you experience that by the way you experience that when you listen to a piece of music that you love, music represents that and that's why people, it's why music nourishes the soul, why it's the highest form of art, at least in my opinion. So you have to live your life as if being is a symphony and you're playing, you have an obligation. I would say an obligation to the development of your soul to speak the truth. You have to be oriented properly though because

the truth is something that exists in service to an ideal, an ideal of sorts. Then you can imagine that you could use your language two ways. You can use your language to manipulate the world and to extract from it what you want. So for example, maybe you go out on a date with someone and you decide that the end goal of the date is to have a sexual partner for the night and then you can craft your language to manipulate the person into providing you with what you want. And that's like an instrumental use of language. But the problem with that, there's many problems with that, but one of the mises that what if your idea about what you should want is wrong, like maybe that's not the way to treat

someone that you're out on a date with, maybe you're minimizing and reducing the interactions between you from what could be a healthy and elevated state of interaction and discourse to something that's basically the pursuit of impulsive pleasure. And maybe that's not good for you next week and the week after and a month down the road, maybe orienting yourself towards impulsive pleasure is a very bad idea. Remember what happens in Pinocchio. Pinocchio goes to Pleasure Island and Pleasure Island is a place where impulsive pleasures can be had at a moment's notice, but what Pinocchio discovers along with Jiminy Cricket that Pleasure Island is run by masked totalitarians. They're all dressed in black, you remember, and they're turning the children and adolescents who are on Pleasure Island. They're depriving them of their voice, turning them into brain jackasses and preparing to sell them as slaves to the salt mines. And so there's an implication in that story that the pursuit of impulse of pleasure is one root to totalitarianism and slavery.

And I believe that. So perhaps orienting your language towards the gathering of the impulsive pleasure is a misuse of your highest gift, your gift of logos, the gift of communication. The alternative is to orient yourself towards the highest good as we already described and then speak the truth, which, and you can tell when you're doing that, because, or you can tell when you're not doing that, because if you're not telling the truth,

if you're using someone else's words, you're being manipulated in a sense by forces that are behind the scenes, you're not using your own words, you're the puppet of an ideology or another thinker or your own impulsive desires. And you can tell when you're speaking like that because it makes you feel weak, it makes you feel weak and ashamed and you can localize that feeling physiologically. If you listen to yourself talk, you can tell when you're speaking properly, you will experience a feeling of integration and strength, and when you're speaking in a deceitful or manipulative manner, you'll feel that you're starting to come apart at the seams.

What you need to do is practice only saying things that make you feel stronger. That'll mean to begin with, that you'll notice that almost everything you say is a lie. It's either a lie or someone else's words. It's very hard to find your own words, but you don't actually exist until you have your own words. So, okay, so then you try to teach yourself

how to speak your own truth, and you listen to other people while you're doing that because they can help you shape and correct your words. They'll react to them badly if you formulate your ideas badly and if you listen and pay attention then you can learn to formulate your words more and more clearly and accurately and that makes you more and more powerful. It makes you, it gives you more and more authority which is the, which is the beneficial form of power. Okay, so you do that and then you have to make a decision of faith and that's basically well that you can either use your language to manipulate the world and make it do what you want or you can use your language to try to articulate the truth as

carefully as you possibly can and then you can see what happens. You have to let go of your desire for the consequences that you want, you have to assume that if you speak the truth, the results are the best that is possible under the circumstances. And so it's an exciting way of living in some sense. It's like continually walking off a cliff because you don't know what's going to happen next. If all you do is say what you think, you know, and maybe you're at work and you say what you think and you get fired and you think, my god That's a terrible catastrophe But maybe it's not because maybe if you're working somewhere and you have to lie to maintain your job Maybe you shouldn't be there Maybe it's deadening your soul and damaging you in some permanent manner and making you corrupt and so

You have to orient yourself you have to speak the truth as carefully as you can You have to listen to others so that you correct your speech. And then you have to allow the consequences that ensue to unfold as they will. That's the ultimate act of faith, I would say. And that's what you do if you belong to truth university. All right, so more practically speaking, then you should educate yourself. And it's not that easy to do now

because you have to find people who can actually tell you mostly what to read and maybe also how to write because writing is a way of formulating your thoughts ever more precisely. That's why you go to university to learn how to write. If you know how to write, you can think. If you can think and speak and communicate in writing, you're unbelievably powerful in the authority manner because arguments move the world forward and if your arguments are tight and well constructed and lucid and well edited and carefully thought through and you have five rationales for everything that you're doing

Which is what happens if you learn to write properly then you're like a force of nature man No one can take you down and that's one of the things that people aren't taught about why you go get educated especially in the humanities Humanities education if it's real, organizes your psyche, grounds you, puts you on a rock, and makes you a force to contend with. But you have to read the right people. And so, and those are the great, they're the great people of the past. In my list, they're the great men of the past, and that's just how it is. And so, here's who I would recommend. I put reading lists up at JordanB Peterson.com.

There's two of them. And the people that I recommend primarily are their books written by the fall of the list of people, Fiodor Dostoevsky, Liyotolstoy, who I think perhaps the greatest novelist the world has ever seen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another great Russian novelist. I don't know what it is about the Russians, but man they produce they produce writers that are incomparable. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a book called The Gulaig Archipelago where he analyzed the Soviet prison camp system that arose after the Leninist revolution in the second decade of the 20th century and details and absolutely precisely how the

tenets of Marxism the Marxist tenets that are supposed to free everyone and change the world, produced legislation that was absolutely murderous in its consequences. And Sogneitz and painstakingly traces the logical pathway from the original Marxist principles to the legislation, to the genocides. Because you'll hear people who are basically Marxists to say things like, well, true Marxism never existed. And Solzhenitsin took that argument apart in the mid-70s.

And the Gulagar Kapelago was an intellectual bomb. It demolished any credibility that Marxism had to intellectual respectability. You have to read the book. The book is about the central issue in our culture at the moment. If you don't read it, you're not informed. You can't participate in the debate, except as a puppet. And so I wouldn't recommend participating in this debate as a puppet, because you don't know who's behind the scenes pulling the strings. If you remember the Pinocchio story, the forces that were pulling the strings were not, they were not forces that were acting in

Pinocchio's best interest. That's for sure. George Orwell English essayist, incomparable commentator on socialist totalitarianism, even though he was a left-winger and a brilliant one, eldest hoxley wrote Brave New World, had some very brilliant things to say about the potential demolition of sexual choice, of choice of sexual partner as a part of a dystopian future. Friedrich Nietzsche, of choice of sexual partner as a part of a dystopian future. Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who described himself as someone who thought with a hammer and Nietzsche as a very, very dangerous person and an absolutely brilliant writer. And Karl Jung, who was a student of Nietzsche and who, Nietzsche was the philosopher who announced the death of God back in the

late 1800s and Jung spent his whole life attempting to revive God. That's one way of thinking about it. And so if you or educate yourself and this is a really good place to start, if you read these authors, then you'll know what else to read. If you read these authors, it'll take you a good long time and it will be very, very hard on you and and you won't be the same person when you come out and that's very frightening. And because being torn down and rebuilt is no joke, but it beats the hell out of the alternative, which is just to stagnate and stay a stagnant infant, which is not something I recommend. There's nothing uglier than a stagnant 40-year-old infant. So that's equivalent, just so you know, to Pin Pinocchio back to the Pinocchio story, rescuing Jepetto from the underworld. Remember when he was, he had kind of turned

into a half jackass after being at the at Pleasure Island where he was enticed by the way from a couple of people who that was the Fox and the cat who attempted to entice himself into believing that he was a victim and needed a vacation. So, Pinocchio was enticed onto Pleasure Pleasure Island by two figures that played on his sense of victimization and neurosis and suffering to convince him that he didn't have to, he didn't have to take any responsibility for his own existence and he could just busy himself with impulsive pleasures, right? That's how he fell into the hands of the totalitarian's on Pleasure Island. Anyways, Pinocchio, after he left Pleasure Island, had to go into the ocean twice, and

the second time he went into the ocean, he was looking for his father. Well, everyone's father from a mythological perspective is dying in the underworld, in the chaos, because everyone inhabits a culture that's sick and old, so to speak, and it's sick and old, because it was made by the dead. And the living have to revive it continually in order for it to be a dynamic force. And the living have to revive their connection with the culture internally, too, because your constructions of culture,

although not only constructions of culture, and you have to understand history, because otherwise you can't understand yourself, you're a historical creature. And so you have to rescue your dead father from the belly of the beast, from the dragon, because remember the whale and Pinocchio is also a fire-breathing dragon. And that means you have to face the thing that you most fear. And when you do that, you'll rescue your father from the underworld. These are very complex ideas, and you can read about them in

my book, Maps of Meaning, if you want. It's on the reading list. I put a free copy of it on JordanB Peterson.com so you can download it. I take apart these sorts of things in detail. So anyways, you have to revivify your father before you can become real. And that's part of the problem with the feminist and social justice warrior insistence on the existence of the patriarchy. It's like everyone's known since the beginning of time that culture is corrupt and tyrannical, but it's also protective and benevolent. Even the language you use is a product of culture. And so you don't overthrow the patriarchy.

You revivify your culture. And you do that by adopting responsibility for your own being and then acting as a moral agent in the culture. That's what you do to become educated. So read these books. Read these books. They'll change your life. I guarantee it. They'll change your life. I guarantee it. They'll change your life.

They'll take you apart. They'll devastate you. And then they'll rebuild you into something far greater than you are now. Your heart. Don't worry. Jenny, you need to get yourself out. Follow the chamber and you'll find Rome.

You were brilliant, folks. I just wasn't quick enough. Of course. Phoenix tears have healing powers. Thanks. It's all right, Jenny. And that's what to aim for. So then, and here's something that will help you. My colleagues and I have developed a series of online writing programs called The Self-Authoring Suite. And they help people write about their past and organize that and their present personality

and organize and understand that. And then the future and the future authoring program asks you to write about six different dimensions of your life. So it asks you first of all, treat yourself as if you're someone that you wanna help and that someone that you love and take care of and someone that you wanna help. And then it asks you, well, if you could organize your life in the best possible manner

in keeping with those principles we discussed earlier, what do you want? What do you want for your career? Like what do you want? What would make your life meaningful? What do you want for your career? What do you want for your family and from your family? What do you want for an intimate relationship? How are you going to handle...how are you going to take care of your family and from your family? What do you want for an intimate relationship? How are you going to handle, how are you going to take care of your mental and physical health? How are you going to handle drug and alcohol use? It asks you a series of fundamental questions like that

to get your mind moving. And then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life could be like, three to five years in the future. If it was laid out like you were laying out a life for someone you deeply cared about. And so you're asked to write for 15 minutes about that without worrying too much about the structure of the argument or any grammatical niceties. That's put off for later. So that gives you a little heaven-day aim for it, right? It's like, oh, well,

if I could have this, my life would be clearly worthwhile, even if I had to put up with a fair bit of suffering along the way. That's what you're trying to construct. And you could think about that as a heaven-worth moving towards. And then the second part of the program asked you to write about what your life would be like three to five years down the road, if all of your bad habits and nihilistic tendencies and proclivity towards resentment and lack of desire to shoulder responsibility, fall your weak points, got that per hand and just augured you into the ground. And everyone knows that. You know what you'd be like if you just let everything slide and you know what particular hell you

were ended up heading towards. And so the second part of the program asks you to write about what your life would be like three to five years down the road if everything just went to hell around you. And so that gives you a hell to avoid and a heaven to strive for. And you need both of those because that's what keeps you properly motivated in life. And then the second half of the program, the next part of the program, helps you turn your vision of the desirable future into an implementable reality and to articulate it fully and to articulate the arguments for why you want that. And those even help you overcome your own doubts, right?

It's not only to argue against other people, it's to argue against the chattering demons of nihilism and hopelessness and ideological possession that that exist in your mind and in society simultaneously. You need powerful weapons to fight back against those and published and I'll put that in the description in the description of this video. And so this program really works if you do it. And so I would highly recommend that you do it. Anyways, you can read about the program there. And so here's what millennials should do if they want to change the world. The first thing they should do is orient themselves to the good. And that's away from evil, away from malevolence, away from the manufacture of pointless suffering and pain, away from Auschwitz, let's say, and away from the Gula Garcopelago and the terrible Soviet camps and the massive murders that occurred in China, you want

to get it and you want to get as far away from that as you possibly can. Whatever direction is away from that is a good direction. And then you also want to contemplate what the highest possible good could look like for you and your family and your society. We already discussed that. And then you need to speak the truth in relationship to that. And then you need to educate yourself. And then you need to shoulder your responsibility. Responsibility is a good thing because it makes you strong. To bear up under it makes you strong. You can turn yourself into a you can free yourself from your strings and turn yourself into a genuine individual. And then you can shoulder shoulder the world and then you're in a position to make change. As a person like that, your mere being will change the world in a positive direction and that's what you should be aiming for.

So read the books that I put up on my site and do the future authoring program and that will improve your life dramatically and that's how you can to the world, nor at least to that corner of it, with which I can communicate, here at the dawn of the New Year in these perilous times. Although I usually speak extemporaneously, that takes a level of capacity that I cannot quite currently manifest, so I'm going to read instead. It's also a careful argument, I hope, and it required the editing for which only the written word can suffice. Dear world, on January 16th, I'm going to talk with Sam Harris on his podcast, Waking Up with Sam

Harris. Dr. Harris is one of the so-called new atheists of which there are four. Like the other three, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Richard Dawkins, who, by the way, I always wanted particularly to debate. Dr. Harris is a smart guy, and I'm certainly not complaining that I will encounter him instead of Dawkins. So I'm preparing my arguments carefully, although I have been doing so for years. The specific ideas I'm going to share with you today were obsessing me from the moment I woke up were obsessing me from the moment I woke up somewhat fitfully this morning.

So I dictated them to my son and then edited them with his help. The central problem of human beings isn't religion as the new atheists insist. It's tribalism. We know this in part because chimps are closest biological kin go to war and they're not religious, although they are tribal. Tribalism also has a central problem and it's not competition, despite the tendency of competition to produce at least temporarily winners and losers. The problem of tribalism is cooperation because cooperation is what allows us to exist as bounded groups. A group by definition is a collective

cooperatively aiming at something. It can't be aimed at nothing because nothing cannot unite. It only divides. Thus attacks on collective purpose, because of its tendency to produce tribalism merely divide. The politics of identity, which emerge when the central purpose is criticized too destructively,

inevitably produce the situation described in the story of the Tower of Babel. Everyone fragments into primitive tribes and speaks their own mutually incomprehensible language. One alternative to fragmentation is, of course, union under a banner, a collective ideal cause or purpose. The problem with uniting under a banner, as the postmodernist who push identity politics rightly point out is that to value something means simultaneously to devalue other things. Thus to value is an exclusionary process. But the alternative is valuelessness, which is equivalent to nihilism.

An nihilism does not produce freedom from exclusion. It just makes everyone excluded, and that's an intolerable state, directionless, uncertain, chaotic, and angst-ridden. When such uncertainty reaches a critical level, the counter-response appears. First, the unconscious, and then the collectively expressed demand for a leader, possessed by the spirit of totalitarian certainty, who promises above all to restore order. Dasa society, without a unifying principle, oscillates, unmoored between nihilism and totalitarianism. Human beings have been wrestling with this problem since the beginning of civilization.

When our capacity to form large groups for all its advantages also started to pose a new threat, that of the hyper domination of the state collective or purpose. But without the state there's just fragmentation into smaller groups. The group itself cannot be done away with because for better or worse, human beings are social animals, not loners like sharks or tigers. We're team players, but being on one team means not being on others. This means that any given team sidelines, marginalized, and alienates those who cannot play their game, as well as conflicting with other teams. In the West, starting in the Middle East thousands of years ago, a new idea began to emerge,

evolve as not too strong a word in the collective imagination. You might following Dawkins consider this a meme, although this is far too weak a word. This idea whose development can be traced back through Egypt to Mesopotamia before disappearing into unwritten history is that of the divine individual. This beyond's old work of the imagination is a dramatic presentation of an emergent idea, which is the solution to how to organize social being without falling prey to nihilistic divisiveness or deceitful totalitarian certainty.

The group must unite, but under the banner of the individual. The individual is the source of the new wisdom that updates the antiquated nihilistic or totalitarian detritus and glory of the past. For better or for worse, that idea reaches its apology and Christianity. The divine individual is masculine because the feminine is not individual. The divine feminine is instead mother and child. However, it is a hallmark of Christian supposition that the redemption of both

man and women comes through the masculine. And that's because the masculine is the individual. The central realization expressed dramatically and symbolically is that the subordination of the group to the ideal of the divine individual is the answer to the paradox of nihilism and totalitarianism. The divine individual is the man that every man admires, and the man whom all women want their men to be. The divine individual is the ideal from which deviations are punished by the group with contempt and disgrace, and fidelity to which is rewarded by the group with attention and honor.

The divine individual is not the winner of any individual game, but the player who plays fairly and is therefore continually invited to play. The divine individual is the builder, maintainer, and expander of the state. He who boldly goes where no man has gone before, and someone who eternally watches over the widows and the children. His power of direct and honest communication is that which identifies, discusses, and then resolves the continually emergent problems of human existence.

It is for this reason that he is regarded as the savior of the world. The primary image for women is not the divine individual because of the heavy burden they bear for reproduction. It is instead the divine mother and child. This is not to say that man is the divine individual and woman is not, although such confusion is understandable given the complexity of the problem. Men, like women, have the divine mother and child as an element of their personality. In men, however, it's in the background, so to speak,

as the divine individual is in the background of the psyche for women, men by necessity play a less primary role in the care of children. This frees them to act as individuals in a manner that up to now has been nearly impossible for women. Identification with these images is belief in them, belief is not the statement of agreement with a set of facts, but the willingness to act something out, to become something, to stake your life on something. For men and women alike, this state. It's in that responsibility and not in rights that meaning itself resides, the meaning that makes life bearable. Societies that refuse to honor both of these elements therefore doom their inhabitants toelessness, unhappiness,

sterility, and the aforementioned dangers of nihilistic divisiveness, and deceitful, oppressive, totalitarian certainty. The meaning and responsibility is the necessary meaning in life which can serve as a counterbalance to its terrible fragility and tenuousness. People must unite under the banner, not of their group, and not of nothingness, but of the individual. This is a brilliant and intrinsically paradoxical solution to to the problems of nihilistic nothingness and two rigid group identity alike. It's the consciousness of the individual, which transforms the chaos of potential into habitable cosmos, as the greatest origin stories repeatedly insist. as the greatest origin stories repeatedly insist. It is that same consciousness which stands up rebellious and revelatory to break down the pathological and two rigid order of that cosmos when it has become old, infirm, willfully blind, and

corrupt. It is that consciousness which is the image of God. It dwells within every embodied human form. The fact of its existence is the reason that the law of the land itself must be bound by ultimate respect for the individual, regardless of his or her sins and crimes. It is that consciousness, not the objective material substrate of being, which should be regarded as the ultimate reality. There is no self-evident reason why dead matter should be given ontological primacy over living spirit. Although doing so has produced a massive increase in human technological power, it has left that power in the hands of an increasingly disenchanted populace, and that presents a mortal

danger. Such power must be wielded by those who have truly and voluntarily accepted the responsibility of being, lest it prove fatal. The West has long been the civilized embodiment of the idea of the divine individual, who does exactly that. That's what the voluntary lifting of the cross of suffering symbolically represents. For all its faults, which are manifold, the West has therefore served as a shining beacon of hope. To those destined to inhabit places, to chaotic or to rigid for the human spirit to tolerate, but the West is engraved danger of losing its way. The negative consequences of this can hardly be overstated. A close reading of 20th century history indicates, as nothing

else can, the horrors that accompany loss of faith in the idea of the individual. It is only the individual must be regarded as primary, if suffering is to be regarded seriously. Without such regard, there can be no motivation to reduce suffering and therefore no respite. Instead, the production of individual suffering can and has and will be again rationalized and justified for its supposed benefits for the future and the group. Effective birth control is emerged as one of the consequences of our powerful technological materialism. This has been accompanied by the rise of states sufficiently civilized, so that women who inhabit them can walk the streets unaccompanied in safety.

We do not yet know how to balance the opportunities thus provided for expanded female individuality with the eternal necessity for a woman to serve as the mother of the divine individual. Dividing our civilization into polarized ideological camps of female group identity and male group identity is certainly not the answer. We have to be honest, male and female alike about what we really want as individuals and talk it out. We know beyond dispute the societies who emancipate their women are more productive and peaceful and that the relationship is causal.

Thus, it's not a matter of if, but how? But such emancipation places a dual burden on the now more autonomous woman who is required to balance manifesting the potential of her individual spirit, with the necessity of desire to bear and rear the next generation of mankind. To live with free women and gain the advantages of their freedom and sophistication. Men must therefore bring their shadowed psychic identification with the divine mother and child into the light without losing their divine individuality in the process. They must consciously, voluntarily, deliberately and strategically accept their responsibility for the relationship between autonomous female companionship, support, love, and the responsibility of producing that next generation.

This means rejecting, among other things, the missbegotten idea of casual sexual gratification, sex is either the impulsive short-term gratification of a domineering biological instinct or the union of two conscious spirits taking responsibility for what they are doing. The former is simply not commensurate with the demands of an advanced civilization, which requires the adoption of responsibility above all for its preservation, maintenance, and expansion. It is for this reason that the sexualized interactions between young men and women in universities, for example, are increasingly and inevitably falling

under the harsh and tyrannical regulation of the state. In the West, we are as well shuddering our great cathedrals, those marvelous monumental embodiments of the idea of the divine individual on which our civilization is based. This is no mere practical material matter. It's a symbolic and ideational process whose importance cannot be overstated without that central idea. We will dissolve and be lost. It is time for each of us to consciously realize what the great symbolic stories of the past insist upon, that we are all sons and daughters of the divine

logos consciousness itself, bearers of its light, and that we must act in accordance with that great central fact, lest all hell break loose. This means above all to tell the truth and to care for one another, starting at the level of the individual and proceeding from that out to the broader reaches of society itself. The alternative, as these same stories have always insisted is the more permanent instantiation of the horror that we already saw manifest in multiple forms in the last bloody terrible century. We need to wake up individual man and woman alike.

Now we need to do it now. Each of us must take the world on our shoulders. In so far as we're capable of that, and adopt individual responsibility for the horrors and suffering its existence entails. In that we will find the meaning without which life is merely the suffering that breeds first resentment and then the desire for vengeance and destruction. We need to take responsibility instead of incessantly insisting on our rights. We need to become adults instead of aged children. We need to and compassion, conjoined, not judgment and pity,

which crushing devour. So, in the coming year, plan to make yourself a better person, fix what you can and would, fix, start now. There's something right in front of you demanding repair, calling out to your conscience, if you would only attend to it for your corrective efforts. However primitive they may yet be. Start small. As you master the process, you can safely and competently expand your

reach. You will then be able to fix bigger things instead of making them worse in the arrogance of your ignorance. If you do this, there will be less pointless and unnecessary suffering, and the world for all its shortcomings and faults will be a better place. we can imagine better than that. That's meaning and purpose enough. Happy New Year and best wishes to you all. Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at selfauthoring.com.

Thank you. you